Impact of climate change and economic factors on Malaysian food price

This paper is motivated by the increasing food price over the recent years (2010 – 2017) in Malaysia. Food is a necessity for mankind and everyone has equal rights to enjoy adequate food protecting from hunger and malnutrition. In general, we understand that food and agriculture production are highly related. Crop production is affected biophysically by climatic variables, i.e. suitable rainfall and temperature for photosynthesis process to take place. If these climatic variables alter extremely in a long-term period, crop production will be affected and crop damage can occur due to the climate change effect such as extreme flood and drought. Hence, if climate change effect is defined as a linear relationship, it will result in a misleading explanation whereby as long as rainfall and temperature increase (or decrease) it will cause the crop production to decrease (or increase). Given the problem associated with food price, this paper investigated the food price determinants by looking at both economic factors and climate change. Non-linear time series analysis namely Engle-Granger (EG) cointegration test and Error Correction Mechanism (ECM) were performed by including the determinants such as Carbon Dioxide (CO2), crude oil price, exchange rate and real gross domestic product (RGDP). The results showed that both economic Real Gross Domestic Product and climate factors jointly affect food price significantly and climate factor (CO2) exhibits a strong non-linear U-shaped impact on food price in the long run. In addition, the Error Correction Term (ECT) showed that food market will have a slower self-recovery mechanism to adjust and return the temporary food market demand-supply shock to the equilibrium

Knowledge Management Systems Diffusion in Chinese Enterprises: A Multi-Stage Approach with the Technology-Organization-Environment Framework

Many enterprises encounter difficulties during the process of KMS diffusion and thus fail to gain benefits from KMS adoption. This study aims to explain why some enterprises succeed while others fail in KMS diffusion. Based on technology diffusion theory and technologyorganization- environment (TOE) framework, we propose an integrated model to examine the influence of factors from the technological, organizational, and environmental aspects on the three-stage KMS diffusion process, i.e., initiation- adoption/adaptation-acceptance /routinization /infusion. In particular, we incorporate social-cultural factors into our model to examine its effect on KMS diffusion, which has not been paid enough attention by prior KMS studies. For the specific research context, we choose China and examine how socialcultural factors influence KMS diffusion process in Chinese enterprises. This study benefits academics by providing a process perspective of KMS diffusion and also provides practical guidance for Chinese enterprises which are engaging in KMS implementation

Identification of H3K4me1-associated proteins at mammalian enhancers.

Enhancers act to regulate cell-type-specific gene expression by facilitating the transcription of target genes. In mammalian cells, active or primed enhancers are commonly marked by monomethylation of histone H3 at lysine 4 (H3K4me1) in a cell-type-specific manner. Whether and how this histone modification regulates enhancer-dependent transcription programs in mammals is unclear. In this study, we conducted SILAC mass spectrometry experiments with mononucleosomes and identified multiple H3K4me1-associated proteins, including many involved in chromatin remodeling. We demonstrate that H3K4me1 augments association of the chromatin-remodeling complex BAF to enhancers in vivo and that, in vitro, H3K4me1-marked nucleosomes are more efficiently remodeled by the BAF complex. Crystal structures of the BAF component BAF45C indicate that monomethylation, but not trimethylation, is accommodated by BAF45C's H3K4-binding site. Our results suggest that H3K4me1 has an active role at enhancers by facilitating binding of the BAF complex and possibly other chromatin regulators

A biological function based biomarker panel optimization process.

Implementation of multi-gene biomarker panels identified from high throughput data, including microarray or next generation sequencing, need to be adapted to a platform suitable in a clinical setting such as quantitative polymerase chain reaction. However, technical challenges when transitioning from one measurement platform to another, such as inconsistent measurement results can affect panel development. We describe a process to overcome the challenges by replacing poor performing genes during platform transition and reducing the number of features without impacting classification performance. This approach assumes that a diagnostic panel reflects the effect of dysregulated biological processes associated with a disease, and genes involved in the same biological processes and coordinately affected by a disease share a similar discriminatory power. The utility of this optimization process was assessed using a published sepsis diagnostic panel. Substitution of more than half of the genes and/or reducing genes based on biological processes did not negatively affect the performance of the sepsis diagnostic panel. Our results suggest a systematic gene substitution and reduction process based on biological function can be used to alleviate the challenges associated with clinical development of biomarker panels

RGD-conjugated rod-like viral nanoparticles on 2D scaffold improve bone differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells

Viral nanoparticles have uniform and well-defined nano-structures and can be produced in large quantities. Several plant viral nanoparticles have been tested in biomedical applications due to the lack of mammalian cell infectivity. We are particularly interested in using Tobacco mosaic virus (TMV), which has been demonstrated to enhance bone tissue regeneration, as a tunable nanoscale building block for biomaterials development. Unmodified TMV particles have been shown to accelerate osteogenic differentiation of adult stem cells by synergistically upregulating bone morphogenetic protein 2 (BMP2) and integrin-binding bone sialoprotein (IBSP) expression with dexamethasone. However, their lack of affinity to mammalian cell surface resulted in low initial cell adhesion. In this study, to increase cell binding capacity of TMV based material the chemical functionalization of TMV with arginine-glycine-aspartic acid (RGD) peptide was explored. An azide-derivatized RGD peptide was “clicked” to tyrosine residues on TMV outer surface via an efficient copper(I) catalyzed azide-alkyne cycloaddition (CuAAC) reaction. The ligand spacing is calculated to be 2–4 nm, which could offer a polyvalent ligand clustering effect for enhanced cell receptor signaling, further promoting the proliferation and osteogenic differentiation of bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs)